Salty Days

It would be a waltz to call "Salty Days" just a treaty of deep house. But it is much more than just that. The co-owners of Hamburg's most gentle record store and label Smallville - Just von Ahlefeld and Julius Steinhoff aka Smallpeople (please see Discogs for ramifactions and further reference) - wouldn't be the romanticists they are, if it would be that simple. The debut album of these two young lads with baseball hats not only honours and delves into a sound that already peaked some fifteen years ago, it also hones and elevates it, without ever falling into the Reynoldsmania trap (please see Retromania for further reference) or being old gold retold. And this is all oh-so-clear from the very start: the fine flutes of "When It's There" go straight to your heart and they do so without any self-mockery or hipster smiles as much as the gasping 303-sounds, chirping birds and healing DX-like bass sounds a few tracks later do. "Salty Days" - an allusion not to grim times, but to a certain member's adoration for the crystalline mineral - is blessed with a coherence that isn't samey, with tradition that isn't leaden and a feeling that is pure. A tough goal admittedly, but the duo succeeds bravely and most of all classily. Like a distillate of US-American innovations and the European backfire on it, the Smallpeople tell their personal love story and jump to their own conclusions. Aptly titled, "Move With Your Vision" and "Black Ice" both concentrate form and content of this album: house music that knows its roots, past and classicism, but is made with the minds and means of today. In the nineties there was the saying that it's impossible to create an album consisting of house music and house music only (those dreary downbeat experiments still haunt us to this day). "Salty Days" is an ideality that belies that statement. Smallpeople - big sounds.